Ted W. Owen
Analyst · Matt Duncan representing Stephens. Please proceed
Thanks Greg. First let me say that I couldn’t be prouder of our organization's performance in the second quarter and indeed for all of the first half of the year. As Greg mentioned we achieved record revenues of $241 million and earnings of $0.80 per share for the quarter and our first half performance of $428 million in revenue and $1.12 of adjusted earnings per share is also a record for six months. But what is exciting is not just the absolute performance but that the performance is broad based. All three business units contributed significantly to our second quarter and year-to-date success. We had double-digit growth in all business units in both the quarter and the year-to-date periods. Our EBIT margin for the quarter at 11.9% was the second highest in the history of Team. And you have to go all the way back to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 to find a higher EBIT margin. And as Greg reported, we achieved operating leverage of over 17% for both the quarter and for the year-to-date periods. That reflects outstanding execution during the quarter by all our business groups. Now let's look in a little more depth at each of the business groups. As you will recall we are organized into three businesses Inspection and Heat Treating which accounts for a little more than half of our revenues, Mechanical Services which is about 35% of revenues, and Quest Integrity Group which is about 10% of our revenues. The Inspection and Heat Treating Group or IHT continued its growth trend by increasing revenues in the second quarter by $25 million, a 23% increase over the prior year second quarter. We achieved revenue growth across every IHT region with 7 of the 11 regions experiencing double-digit growth. And more impressively all IHT regions reported double-digit operating income percentages. Some of the contributing factors to this broad based growth are pipeline projects in the Northeast region and Canada, new construction and capital projects in the Southeast and Gulf, large heat treating projects in the West and Canada, as well as broad based turnaround and outage services across all regions. We are excited about the outlook for IHT for the second half of the year. We have significant new and continuing customer projects scheduled across most of our regions. We are already benefiting from the development and launch of our wireless mobile smart rig and our heat treating services, and collaborative efforts are underway with Quest to broaden our high energy piping, inspection and assessment capabilities which we expect to expand our addressable markets and continue to support our strong growth in advanced inspection services. We expect continued positive momentum in IHT. Our Mechanical Service Group had a 19% increase in revenues in the quarter, up $13.2 million versus the prior year quarter. The growth was also broad based across all regions and service offerings with five of eight Mechanical Service regions growing at double-digit rates and five of eight regions having double-digit operating income percentages. Helping to fuel that growth were turnaround activities and various service line expansion initiatives. Turnaround activities were strong across most of our regions throughout the quarter. Other contributing factors are service line expansion initiatives in valve repair, field welding, and project services. We are building both our personnel and fixed facilities to support our valve repair service offerings in several regions along with expanded capabilities in Europe associated with our recent acquisition in the UK. Specialty field Orbital Welding Services were enhanced and increased along the Gulf Coast to support the growing demand. Project Services which is a centralized business unit within Mechanical Services was established to coordinate and leverage Team's offering for larger turnarounds, shutdowns in projects. Those are just a few of the business building initiatives that are underway with the Mechanical Service business unit. Looking ahead to the third quarter and beyond, we also have a number of exciting turnarounds and expansion projects scheduled across the entire network. We believe that our spring turnaround activity, our participation in new capital projects, as well as new run and maintain customers will help continue our growth in Mechanical Services throughout remainder of the year. Now let’s talk about Quest. Quest Integrity generated $6.3 million in operating income on $22.5 million in revenue in the second quarter representing 13% and 16% year-over-year growth in revenue and operating income respectively. The 28% operating profit for Quest in the quarter reflects the power of incremental revenues that we’ve described frequently to investors and puts us on track to achieving our annual target of 20% operating income. Our pipeline sector activity including both Inspection and Engineering Assessment Services drove the quarter’s strong performance domestically and abroad. Looking at the full first half of our fiscal year, we see the impact of increased utilization on Quest Integrity’s capacity and infrastructure investments that we have made during fiscal 2014. The first half’s revenue performance of $37 million represents a 13% increase over the prior year and at 7.1 million in operating income, 48% growth over the prior year. We currently see healthy momentum in virtually all business sectors as we move into the second half. Coupled with the commercial implications of several of Quest Integrity’s new NDT tool initiatives which we are beginning to introduce to the market. With applications in the pipeline, process, and power markets we remained comfortable with Quest Integrity’s fiscal 2015 budget expectations of $80 million in revenue and $16 million in operating profit that we have disclosed previously to you. To summarize, we are obviously off to a very good start for the first half of our year and we expect positive momentum into the second half of the year. Having said that, I caution our analyst not to simply extrapolate the first half of the year to the second half. Remember first that the third quarter is always very challenging for us. While we don’t expect the severe weather events this year that we had last year, we still have to deal with the natural seasonal slowness and the resetting of significant benefit cost on January 1st of each year. With that in mind and based on our positive view of the spring turnaround season, we believe though that we are on track to achieving our $840 million revenue target and $2 in EPS target for fiscal 2015. We can’t conclude our prepared remarks however without addressing the question on everyone’s mind. What is the impact of declining oil prices on our business? Believe me we think about this a lot and have our ears firmly to the ground and listening for signals from our customers of any changes in their maintenance or inspection behaviors. At this point in time we are seeing no indication that lower commodity prices will significantly impact our business. If you think about that, this perspective on minimal impact makes sense. 90% of our revenues are associated with the installed base of mostly midstream and downstream energy facilities, generally far removed from upstream production activities. Demand for inspection and maintenance is a function of the population of operating facilities. As we often say, it’s the population of high pressure, high temperature piping systems. If plants are running, our services are required for the safe and efficient operation of those facilities. Even with respect to the 10% of our business that’s associated with new construction activities, we don’t expect much impact. Remember that the industrial expansion renaissance on the Gulf Coast is driven by the abundance of low cost shale gas and not directly related to oil commodity prices. Having said that, lower commodity prices should make us all cautious about the near to mid term outlook even though we have seen no indications of changing behavior from our customers at this time. So with that let me now ask Phil to provide his perspective on our performance and outlook.